Sorry for the delay folks. Page took a little longer to draw than I expected… sort of rusty when it comes to pages that aren’t just people talking I guess. Also, as usual, busy. Unfortunately my work hasn’t been shut down by the goings-on of the world, though it’s starting to become a bit of a shit show despite the fact that you’d think it’d barely be impacted… lot of people suddenly not working for various reasons, travel cancelled, schedules in chaos, you know how it goes. Plus all the wankers that normally spend all day in meetings doing god knows what are suddenly no longer occupied with their normal bullshit and are out to waste the rest of our time. Freeing middle-management lackies from the meeting-room-shaped-cages might be the single biggest productivity hit yet.

Hope ya’ll are safe and healthy. Stay inside. Read webcomics. #notbiased.

I’ll see what I can do to at least keep the weekly schedule.

As for the actual comic…

Arkady’s reaction is about 7 shots too late, but I guess it does help in the last few panels anyway. Naomi has very fast reactions, but she prioritized shoving Arkady over dodging herself; last time she got shot she went a little… crazy, but that time she was hurt a lot worse as she wasn’t really boosted much when she got hit, and it was from a much more powerful rifle. Boosting doesn’t heal something like Rovak or Mium might heal from being shot, but taken to the extreme it can partially recover and generally mitigate the damage, though as we saw there, not completely or even entirely effectively.

Despite the accusations that were are leveled about things blowing up around Peter, this time Peter wasn’t even particularly close, and things still blew up. See, it’s not always his fault.

Throwing a grenade at mages can obviously be a bit dangerous; even set with a very short “fuse” (which is dangerous on it’s own) some mages have reaction speed to use magic to repel it before it gets even half way to them (throwing a grenade at a mage like Kally or worse yet Ila would be almost entirely like just sticking it in your own mouth). The obvious counter to this is another mage or nullcaster. But generally speaking well armed or experienced people that are hunting powerful mages have better armaments for the job than a grenade. That said, explosives are always a cheap way to try to level a fight when you might otherwise not have tools for the job… just a dangerous one. In this case they got a bit lucky on the timing, though Naomi isn’t particularly good at the sort of magic that would make it a particularly bad idea.